SALT LAKE CITY — State Department employees who undermine President Donald Trump’s agenda are “betraying” the American people, according to Rep. Chris Stewart.
The Utah Republican said federal employees don’t just work for the president.
“They work for the people of the United States and the people selected this president. They’re not betraying the president. They’re betraying the people,” Stewart said Monday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.” “They’re betraying the trust and the Constitution which has sustained us for more than 200 years.”
But, he said, those employees don’t view it that way. They see themselves as “being so smart and we made a mistake and we have to correct it.”
Stewart, who has condemned the impeachment inquiry from the start, said the Democrats’ process is far from fair and called it “nonsense.”
“I mean if you consider this fair, it’s like Mr. Stalin, ‘Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,’” he said.
Democrats moved to closed sessions because the open hearings have been a “disaster” for them because nothing advanced their impeachment narrative, Stewart said. Closing hearings and releasing transcripts instead has been equally disastrous, he said.
“If there was anything in these hearings that would convince the American people that this president should be impeached, I promise you they would be holding them in open hearing,” he said.
Stewart, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the Democrats’ strategy now is to do everything in secret and “leak and lie.”
“And in some cases, they’re not even taking entire sentences. They’re taking pieces of a sentence, pieces of a text,” he said. “Every day we’ll go in and hear this, much of it supportive of the president. It leaks to media and the next report is exactly opposite.”
The media, he said, are unwilling to ask basic questions.
“They’ve proven to be the least curious people in the universe,” Stewart said.